Build Some Bridges
by elisabethjj
Summary: 'We've had to build some bridges,' Kane says, by way of explanation. So, while Clarke was scrambling down the side of some godforsaken foothill, Bellamy was getting married. To Lexa. (In which Clarke deals with heartbreak, Bellamy can't deal with anything and Lexa just wants to have her cake and eat it.) A Bellarke fic.
1. Chapter 1

Build Some Bridges

 _Disclaimer: Anything you recognise belongs the folk that make 'The 100' TV show._

Part One

By the time Clarke makes it back to Camp Jaha, seasons have slipped by. Somehow, with her wandering and growing and learning to live with herself again after the horror of Mount Weather, it's been six months. It's been one of those six months where everything changes; for Clarke and for the Arkers both.

She's tired: the kind of bone-deep tiredness that comes from too much soul-searching and not quite enough food and the strain of always having to watch her own back, keeping alert to any danger she might ignorantly stumble into. There are gorillas and snakes and poisonous berries. There are Grounders who might hurt her because they don't know who Clarke of the Sky People is, or because they do. There's the deep, biting cold and rainstorms and steep mountain sides and slippery rocks and deep ravines and fast-flowing rivers and all this big, scary, wonderful world that can hurt her in a heartbeat. Clarke has survived it, but she's changed. Six months of being utterly alone has forced her to confront, well, everything. This new Clarke—this woman who let the missile fall, who knew that sending Bellamy to likely death was 'worth it', who pulled the lever and who has made some kind of almost-peace with it all—she's tired and she is ready to come home.

Home, if that's what Camp Jaha ever was, or was on the way to being, has changed too.

'We've had to build some bridges,' Kane says, by way of explanation. They're sitting in the med-bay, two days after her return, after Abby has declared her daughter fit and well. It's been two days of rehydration, nutrition boosters and Abby generally fussing over an otherwise physically uninjured Clarke. Clarke has let Abby get on with it: she's missed her mom and, anyway, the med-bay is a nice halfway house to ease back into human interaction without being swamped by the rest of her friends all at once. Except, as it turns out, she doesn't have many friends left at Camp Jaha. Half of them have moved to TonDC.

'It wasn't practical to let Lexa's betrayal at Mount Weather fester into outright hostilities.'

It's not like Clarke can disagree with Kane's assessment of the situation. The Trikru still rules the forests that the Arkers have made their Camp in and Clarke's people are in no position to be at war with their neighbors while they're still getting on their feet. The shocking part is how they've gone about cementing the renewed alliance. While Clarke's been talking herself down from self-loathing on her unscheduled walkabout, Kane and Abby have been arranging political marriages between Trikru and Skaikru.

'Don't looked so shocked, honey,' Abby says. 'It's the oldest way in the book to generate goodwill between two groups of people. Make their family your family. Everybody agreed it made sense, and it was an easy way to help ease tensions between us and the Grounders.'

Clarke nearly chokes on the water she is sipping.

'Easy way for everybody except those of us forced into a marriage against their will,' she says, incredulously.

'No-one was forced,' Kane says, leaning against the empty cot bed opposite. 'We discussed it openly with the Camp. Octavia and Lincoln were the first to volunteer. They were hand fasted three months ago, along with two other couples. A handful of people on both sides also volunteered to enter courtships.' At Clarke's blank look Kane continues. 'That's a kind of pre-marriage arrangement the Grounders told us about. They use it where inter-village or inter-clan marriages have been common as a method to keep bloodlines varied and bring people with new skills into the villages. The courtship agreement runs for a full cycle of the seasons, giving both parties the chance to opt-out of the 'marriage', consequence free, at any point during the year. Or, if they want, to become hand fasted at the end of the courtship.'

'Sounds like a bad romance novel,' Clarke mutters, mutinously, thinking of the battered, ancient novels they'd had on the Ark, yellowing pages belying the pulse-pounding, bodice-ripping stories contained within.

'Less to do with romance than practicality,' says Abby, shrugging her shoulders gently. 'You'd be surprised at how many of our people are ready to find some security and settle down to making real lives for themselves on the ground. People are tired of just surviving. They want to make friends and have families, to find some simple satisfaction in life.'

'Once Bellamy and Lexa set a leader's example, it was actually surprisingly easy to find willing volunteers from both sides of the fence.'

And that, right there, in case you're wondering, is the point at which Clarke's world falls sickeningly away from her.

 **::: ::: :::**

It turns out that Lexa really wants to make this re-forged alliance work. Enough to decide to be the first to take one of the Sky People in marriage—enough to tie herself to one of the most respected Skaikru warriors and leaders. Enough to make Bellamy her husband.

It happened at the beginning of the summer. While Clarke was scrambling down the side of some godforsaken foothill, Bellamy was getting married. To Lexa. He's been living with Lexa all this time. Sleeping side by side with Lexa. Fucking Lexa.

Clarke feels the shock of this knowledge reverberate through her whole body and it hurts way more than she feels like it should. Sure, she knows that there was never anything acknowledged between Bellamy and herself. They had found a way to work well together as leaders, when they were needed as such. They had come to rely on each other, to be each other's partner but, Clarke has to admit, it had never exactly been more than that. Not anything spoken out loud. Not anything she can call him on, or hold him to. She knows this feeling now though: this punch to the gut, these phantom hands crushing her ribcage. Clarke Griffin knows heartbreak when she feels it.

Raven is sympathetic to Clarke's misery. It seems that the events at Mount Weather were enough for Raven to move on as far as Clarke is concerned, to put Finn and Clarke's role in Finn's death behind them, for the sake of their friendship and a fresh start. With the uncanny insight that the mechanic has always had into Clarke's thoughts, Raven calls her on her mooning over Bellamy's marriage.

'It sucks,' Raven says, peeking out from behind her workbench one morning. Clarke's hanging around Raven and Wick's working quarters for the company under the guise of dropping off breakfast. 'Your timing sucks. Maybe if you hadn't done a runner after Mount Weather—' She shrugs, not bothering to soften her words, as per usual, 'but you did. And Bellamy had a choice to make, and he made it, and you weren't even an option on the list at the time. So now, it's time to move on. Get yourself together, 'cos now you're back on the Council you won't be able to hide from Lexa and Bellamy forever. And you don't want to make a dick of yourself when you run into them.'

It's true. Despite her age, Clarke's considered somewhat of a war general by the Arkers and the remaining delinquents follow her lead above the actual Chancellor, so she'd had little choice but to accept the Council seat that Marcus and her mother had offered upon her return. Add to that the fact that the Grounders view her as the Sky People's princess, and it's fairly obvious that it won't be too long before her political duties put her face to face with her old ally (new ally?) Lexa.

When Bellamy left for TonDC, he took quite the entourage with him. Octavia and Lincoln, obviously—who would be stupid enough to try and separate the Blake siblings on a good day? As well as some of the adults who had formed Courtships with Trikru, Monty, Miller and Harper all opted to go with Bellamy. In fact, if Raven hadn't stayed at Camp Jaha, Clarke thinks she'd be going stir crazy right now from the loneliness. Funny. Half a year without speaking to another human being and now that she'd back, Clarke feels lonely. She misses Bellamy more here than she ever did while wandering the countryside aimlessly—and she'd have said she missed him a lot then. If nothing else, she'd do a lot for the chance to see her other friends again.

'I miss all of them,' Clarke says, playing with a wrench on the surface in front of her to avoid Raven's shrewd gaze.

'Uh-huh.'

'I do,' Clarke says, insistent. 'If facing Lexa and Bellamy is what it takes to see Octavia and Monty and the rest of our friends again, I can do it. I'll have to.'

As it happens, the opportunity comes sooner than Clarke expects.


	2. Chapter 2

Build Some Bridges

 _Disclaimer: Anything you recognise belongs the folk that make 'The 100' TV show._

Part Two

The days go by: Clarke throws herself into her medic training with her mom and Jackson, gives her best effort to Council business and works on re-building relationships with the friends she has left. Injury and sickness is easy to come by, living the way they are, and her days in the med-bay are full of infections, pulled muscles, cuts and sprains. She knows winter is going to be even worse. She's learning a lot from Abby and Jackson, and she's followed up on the knowledge she gleaned from Lincoln about how the Grounders use herbs and plants to heal. Sometimes Raven accompanies Clarke on her forages down by the river or in the hedgerows. She asks Jasper once or twice, but he declines. The hot white fire of his rage seems to have cooled, but Clarke isn't sure Jasper will ever be able to look at her as a friend again. She accepts it because she has to. Before she knows it, Clarke has been back at Camp Jaha for two months.

She thinks about Octavia, wondering if she is continuing training with Indra, wondering if she is still happy with Lincoln. She thinks about Monty, Miller and Harper—what are they doing now? She knows they will protect Bellamy with their lives. She hopes they are protecting themselves too. She hopes they are happy.

She tries not to think about Bellamy. It's better that way. Sometimes, when she wakes up shivering, sweat cooling on her skin in the small hours of the morning, it is Bellamy's face that fades with her dream. It's the faint ghost of Bellamy's hands trailing goosebumps across her flesh, and she forces her eyes open, forces herself to focus on the grey, metal paneling of her Ark compartment, until she's firmly rooted in reality again. She never knew his hands, except as they grasped her to haul her across the terrain, or help her run faster from danger. She never felt them trace her skin like a lover. She never knew she wanted too until… Well, it's too late for that. Clarke sits up and goes to get a headstart on the day.

Fall is coming to an end and the Camp is busy making preparations for the cold weather ahead when two unexpected arrivals disrupt the proceedings, in quick succession.

First, John Murphy comes back. Skittish, and brittle, and hard-eyed as ever—his eyes dart, mistrusting, around the group of guards until they settle on Clarke, striding toward the main gate with Kane at her side. If the full blown hug she pulls him into startles him he hides it with his usual swagger and, dammit, she is glad to see him, even after all the shit they've been through. Perhaps because of it. Murphy tells them his story, about finding the City of Lights with Jaha. About how Jaha had finally flipped his lid and started talking to hallucinations and Murphy just left him in a big empty house, came home because he didn't know where else to go.

'You did the right thing, John,' Clarke says. 'You came home.' She's not sure if she's telling Murphy or herself, but he flushes, pleased, all the same. They still don't trust each other completely but he feels like family and that's something she's short of around here. Some of the delinquent kids are still here, and she looks out of them, she always will, but—But she had a circle of peers and they all carried the weight together and that's gone now. She left that, and now they've left her.

Murphy doesn't seem to know what to do with himself now he's back. (She knows how he feels.) He's taken to hanging with Clarke, Raven and Wick. Clarke's the only authority figure he will recognize, and even then his feigned indifference lies thick on his every action. The four of them are in Raven and Wick's cabin—one of the newest huts on stilts that they've built for the winter, small but with a fireplace and some measure of privacy— when the second interruption arrives.

The unexpected delegation from TonDC is small; just four of Lexa's warriors and, to everyone's delight, Miller.

'Hell, girl,' Miller says, grinning as he takes in the sight of Clarke for the first time in a long time. 'You had us scared with that disappearing act. Bellamy's going to do that tight-lipped, arms crossed, staring thing when I tell him you're alive—you know, the thing he does when he's all relieved as fuck and trying to stay tough.'

'Yeah,' Clarke says, weakly. She knows the thing. She knows all of Bellamy's things.

'You should have sent word.'

'I know,' Clarke says, because she should have. Would have, if she wasn't too scared of Bellamy coming to visit and having to be in the same space as him and pretend she hadn't realised she was hideously jealous of him touching his own wife. Or even more scared that he wouldn't come. Eurgh. Whatever. 'You've all had a lot going on though, I hear.'

With that, Miller launches into an update on their friends, the state of the alliance and all things TonDC, that lasts well into the evening meal. He's got a separate list of discussion points for the Council's ears only, that Clarke gets to hear the next day, after the nice evening of pleasant torture as Miller regales them with the state of Bellamy's relationship ('that Commander's one tough chick, y'all, but, hey, Bellamy's been used to dealing with Clarke here, right? Right? Ha.') and Raven subtly squeezes Clarke's hand under the table.

The lieutenant Lexa has sent with Miller to carry her message is a physically dense, hunk of a man called Rand. Rand of the Tree People doesn't say a lot, but can silence the Ark Council with a glare and is apparently totally immune to Abby's eyebrows of doom. Clarke is, frankly, impressed.

At the end of a long day of negotiations, the situation can be summarized as this:

TonDC needs to borrow a healer. Nyko's out working in some of the more outlying villages and Lexa doesn't want the capital to be without a healer over the winter months. Now, Jackson is the perfect choice to go, but his girlfriend is five months into a difficult pregnancy and there's no way she can travel until the spring, after the kid is born. Also no way Jackson is leaving her. Abby and Jackson have recently taken on two trainees from among the Arker population, but they are too green to go it solo just yet.

So this is how, several months after returning to Camp Jaha, Clarke finds herself packing to leave to spend winter in TonDC.

While Rand and the other Trikru seem suitably impressed that the Sky People will send their own _heda_ to serve as healer—there's no convincing them, even after all this time, that Clarke is not the leader or at least the war general of her people—Clarke is having to take deep breaths as she neatly rolls her meager supply of clothing and personal belongings into a travel pack. It's not that she particularly feels attached to Camp Jaha, but she is attached to Raven, and her mom, and the remaining delinquents. She feels a little better at their chances of a comfortable winter after clapping eyes on the shit ton of animal pelts and extra bags of grain that Lexa has sent in fair trade for borrowing one of the Skaikru healers.

All of that aside, Clarke is both excited and terrified to see Bellamy. While the sensible part of her knows that seeing him and Lexa together is last thing she wants and will only lead to all the pain she's been trying to avoid thinking about these past months, there's an undeniable idiotic part of Clarke that longs to see Bellamy's face again and to hear his rich, lilting voice speak her name.

Murphy is coming with them. Miller seems confident the Trikru will make room for him and he'll be welcome in the little community of ex-pats living in TonDC. There's nothing keeping him here, even less that there is keeping Clarke. Her heels are digging into the ground of Camp Jaha but she can feel the promise of Bellamy, Octavia and her other family pulling her onwards. There's nothing for it—Clarke has learned the hard way that there's no point fighting the tide and right now it's dragging her back to Bellamy Blake. She hugs Abby, Raven, Wick and forces a brief goodbye on Jasper, because you never know when it might be the last time you see someone and that hard way also taught her not to leave on an angry note. Then they're off, and there's three days of hard horse riding ahead to think about the myriad of ways in which this is a very bad idea.


End file.
